"Karel Appel had been deeply interested in the paintings and drawings of the mentally ill since his discovery of Dubuffet's Art brut. As he explained years later, he had had access to this type of work in Holland, Belgium and Paris. However, it was the 1950 exhibition [September 1950, exhibition of Art, inaugurated at the Centre Psychiatrique Sainte-Anne, Paris] that opened his eyes definitively and enabled him to shake off European classicism.. .[But] what I want to point up here is that, although the Sainte-Anne exhibition was crucial for his understanding of such paintings, he had already made his own excursions into 'psychopathological art'[before]."